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The Day God Turned His Cheek:  or,  Can there be a non-violent atonement?

“The gospel is not a message of personal salvation from the world, but a message of a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures” (Walter Wink)

As a pacifist, it troubles me to think that the understanding of the atonement that many Christians hold is dependant on the idea of ‘divinely sanctioned, retributive violence.’¹ Building on the work of John Howard Yoder,² J. Denny Weaver, Christopher Marshall and others, I have sought to discover if the atonement might look different when viewed from a peace church perspective. Specifically, can we conceive of an atonement that is consistent with the non-violent life and teachings of Jesus?³

Why did God take on humanity?

In the eleventh century, Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury, presented his Satisfaction model of the atonement. He was specifically responding to understandings of the atonement that understood it as a ploy to catch-out the Devil. Though variations of this view had been the predominant view since the early church, Anselm felt it was inappropriate. God was neither deceitful to play such a trick, nor did he acknowledge any rights for Satan.

In place of the prevailing model, Anselm argued that the death of Jesus was intended to satisfy the honour and justice of God. Humanity had sinned and dishonoured God by not obeying Him as they should. Now, God’s honour had to be repaid, but no human could make the offering because he already owes God everything and the debt on top of his own required obedience is greater than he can pay. In reality, only God could make an offering large enough to cover the debt of all Sin, but it would not be just for God to make it, because it is not his debt to pay.

Thus, in his famous Cur Deus Homo,⁴ Anselm concludes that since only Man should make the payment and since only God could make it, it would need to be paid by someone who was both Man and God: enter Jesus Christ, the God-Man. Through the reformers, Luther and Calvin, this view developed into penal substitution, where the emphasis is upon Jesus receiving the punishment of death that our sins have acquired. He took our place and paid our debt – death – so that we can now be forgiven.

Anselm’s model has gone on to be the most popular understanding of the atonement in Western theology. Yet, it has always had its critics. Peter Aberlard formulated his ‘moral influence’ theory in direct opposition to what he saw as a gross distortion of the character of God in Anselm.⁵ However in recent years opposition to the satisfaction model – or, more specifically, to the penal substitution variant – has increased. It has come under attack from Black theologians, Feminists and Anabaptists and other pacifists.

Some challenge that satisfaction atonement is nothing but “divine child abuse." Though the language of this criticism is unhelpfully shocking – and perhaps prejudges those who hold the view – it makes an important point. Anselm’s model portrays God the Father inflicting undeserved suffering on his own son to defend His own dignity.

Denny Weaver argues that "satisfaction atonement in any form depends on divinely sanctioned violence that follows from the assumption that doing justice means to punish."⁶ This not only paints a picture of God as a violent and vengeful deity, but it also shows God acting in ways that contradict the non-violent Christ of the gospel.

Moreover, it is pastorally irresponsible as it discourages resistance to violent oppression. This has been a major complaint of black theologians and feminists. Anselm’s model makes a positive virtue out of innocent suffering and passive submission to an abusive authority.⁷ It is historically true that such an approach has been used to stifle the complaints of slaves and to silence the cries of abused spouses. It has sanctioned ill-treatment of the marginalized and placed incontestable power in the hands of ungodly oppressors.

Additionally, the satisfaction model is ahistorical and consequently devoid of ethical content. It conceives of atonement as something that takes place outside of actual history. It depends on some “spiritual” (read, ‘abstract’) transaction between God the Father and the Son that removes human guilt and restores God's honour but fails to address the actual structures of oppression.

Satisfaction atonement also takes place outside the particular history of Jesus' earthly ministry. His life and teachings are somehow divorced from his death. In fact, it reduces the meaning of Jesus' life to some elongated preface – a demonstration that the lamb was spotless and apt to die in our place. It might even be said that the best thing about Jesus' life is that it came to an end!

Anabaptists have long complained that the creeds move directly from incarnation to crucifixion, with all that transpired in between having no ultimate significance for salvation or atonement. This is expressed perfectly in satisfaction atonement. Likewise, there is little real need of the resurrection. Our debt is paid at the cross and the resurrection is little more than God’s stamp of approval – a stamp placed on Christ and then anyone who simply believes in him. Consequently, salvation becomes separated from ethics, eventually permitting Christendom Christianity to regard violence as compatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So is there an alternative? Is it possible to conceive of a non-violent, ethically-transforming, biblical model of the atonement? I believe it is and I’d like to use the rest of this paper to formulate my understanding of this.⁸ I aim to suggest that the death of Jesus was an outworking of his commitment to ‘turn the other cheek’ and to seek peace and liberation through non-violent resistance of the powers.

Turning the other cheek

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (Matthew 5:39-41)

There are no concrete statistics, but I would suspect that these words are amongst the most famous that Jesus ever spoke. And, of course, with that goes the admission that they are surely also amongst the most ignored. The trouble is that they seem unrealistic, naive and irrelevant. How do you give more to a government that only uses what it has to oppress? How do you turn the other cheek to weapons of mass distraction? Can Jesus really mean what he says here – are his followers meant to be passive door-mats, standing by and suffering silently while evil flourishes? Suddenly what appears to be one of Christ’s most ethical sayings seems essentially unethical!

I believe that Jesus means for his words to be taken seriously, but I don’t believe that he is calling for passive inaction. Christ is here teaching to not fight violence done against us with violence against our oppressors – or, as Paul later put it, not to repay evil with evil (Rom. 12:17). When Jesus says, ‘if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,’ we need to see that the most natural way for someone to strike us on the right cheek is with the back of the hand. ⁹ However, when Jesus spoke these words he was addressing people who would never consider striking an equal in such a humiliating way. In fact, to do so carried a heavy fine. Therefore, following Walter Wink,¹⁰ it seems reasonable to conclude that in turning the cheek the oppressed person is refusing to be humiliated. The oppressor can now either strike with the right fist (and acknowledge that he is facing an equal), strike with his left hand and violate his own laws and customs, or desist from his violence altogether.

The same message is being conveyed in Jesus’ other examples. Jewish law permitted a creditor to take someone’s tunic as security when lending to the poor; they would have nothing else to offer as a guarantee of payment (Exodus 22:25-27; Deut. 24:10-13, 7). However, the creditor had to return the tunic each night so that the poor person might not be forced to sleep naked. In the scene that Jesus describes – which seems to take place in a court-room setting – if the poor person was to remove their cloak as well as their tunic they would be exposing themselves in public, thus bringing shame upon the person who caused their nakedness. Moreover, they would be highlighting the inhumanity of the exploitative imbalance of wealth and a society that puts the poor at the mercy of the rich.

Finally, Jesus pictures a scenario where a Roman soldier has forced a Jew to carry his back-pack. According to Roman law, soldiers were allowed to compel someone to carry a burden for them, but this was strictly limited to one mile. This limitation apparently served to protect the oppressed labourer, but Jesus teaches his followers to embarrass those who would impose such laws by demonstrating that they can keep going another mile. The Roman soldier thus runs the risk of being punished by his superiors and might think twice about enforcing such help in the future.

Each of these examples are summed up by Paul when he writes:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
  if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
  In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
(Romans 12:20-21)

A number of lessons from the life of Gandhi capture this well. It is well known that Gandhi eschewed violence and looked to Jesus as his inspiration in that. On one occasion he is discussing this with an Anglican clergyman who suggests that Jesus might not have literally meant for us to turn the other cheek. Gandhi disagrees and argues that doing so reminds our oppressors of our humanity and the inhumanity of their actions. This is powerful and disarming. At a number of points in his ‘career’ Gandhi deliberately went into situations where he knew he was risking his life. His intention was to expose the brutality of British rule and to show the world that India would not give up and that this oppression would not conquer their peaceful resistance. Gandhi was simultaneously demonstrating his own strength and revealing the weakness and cruelty of this foreign oppression.

Similarly, Martin Luther King claimed that his goal was to awaken a sense of shame within his white oppressors and thus to challenge their mistaken sense of superiority. This reminds me of a story I head about a black woman walking along the street with her two children when a white man spat in her face. She stopped and said, "Thank you, and now for the children." The man was, understandably, taken aback and didn't know how to respond. This woman had, in effect, beaten her oppressor and stripped him of his power.

I suggest that it is precisely this kind of ‘resistance’ that Jesus is talking about. He is, as is made clear by Paul after him, both prohibiting violent retribution and encouraging creative non-violent struggle. As Weaver states, Jesus ‘was teaching non-violent ways for oppressed people to take the initiative, to affirm their humanity, to expose and [thus] neutralize exploitative circumstances.’¹¹ By living this way Christians demonstrate the Life of the kingdom of God and oppose the tyranny of death and its violent expressions.

Confronting the Powers

Christ’s confrontation did not take place in an invisible spiritual realm beyond time and place. Rather his struggle was made manifest in his continuing conflict with the powers of racism, sexism, abuse of the poor and violence embodied in the political and religious structures that surrounded him. He did not come to simply deliver us from the penalty of our own personal sin, but to liberate us from the very real power of societal systemic Sin.

Christopher Marshall has suggested that ‘violence is the foremost social manifestation of sin; it is all-pervasive in human experience.’¹² Violence reveals the condition of the human heart and demonstrates our alienation from the life-giving God (James 1:13-15). Sin has now so mastered humanity (Gen. 4:7) that we all instinctively seek to impose our will on others, and we know that violence is the most effective way to do so.

Violence also sets in motion a "pay-back" mechanism - a powerful desire in the victimised to seek compensation, to hurt those who have hurt us.¹³ The Jewish command to take ‘an eye for an eye’ was originally intended to limit the amount of restitution that one could seek. Thus, you could not knock someone’s house down because they injured your horse. However, this also served to legitimate the human desire to seek revenge and continued the cycle of violence. As Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye” only results in the whole world going blind. The retaliation instinct thus reveals Sin’s most deadly power by turning sinned–against victims into sinful oppressors. It creates patterns and systems of behaviour that allow violence to spiral on forever. We see this all around us and within, from children pushing one another in the school yard to religious wars in Northern Ireland.

Jesus came to break this cycle and to show us how to live under the reign of God. Thus, he demonstrated in his own life the power of non-violent resistance to the powers. He liberated victims of religious and sexual oppression and refused to support the systems that promoted such repression. He turned the other cheek and discipled his followers in this peaceful rebellion against the power of death. However, to really disentangle the spiral of sin it was necessary for him to endure the full weight of violence – an unjust and oppressive cessation of life – and to do so without seeking retaliation. This is precisely what he did, praying "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do." It was in this action that Jesus demonstrated the inhumanity of sin and the weakness of oppressive power. He lived his own message of non-violence, peace, forgiveness and love. He turned the other cheek and in doing so he disarmed the powers and authorities (the institutionalised embodiments of Sin and Death) and made a spectacle of them (Col. 2:15).

Christ broke the power of sin, but not through repaying violence with violence. If Jesus Christ truly reveals God to us, then we see in Christ the will and ways of the Father. Thus, it is inconceivable that Christ would teach that those who live by the sword will die by the sword and that we should not react to violence with violence, but that the Father would deal with human sin through the violent substitutionary punishment of his Son! Jesus teaches us – through his words and the whole of his life – to turn the other cheek to violence. Then, in his death, Christ fully and finally reveals God’s answer to Sin. Jesus absorbed the very worst that the powers have to offer, and the Father turned his cheek.

This does not mean that God passively succumbed to an oppressive power, but that he unleashed a greater power – grace – and thus broke the cycle of violence and retaliation and crushed the power of Sin, revealing it to be bankrupt and powerless. In Christ, God fought the oppressive powers precisely the way Christ has instructed us to: creatively, persistently, graciously and non-violently.

Jesus’ resurrection was the conclusive revelation that the victory that the Lion of Judah secured was achieved by the lamb that was slain.¹⁴ The resurrection is not an announcement that “might is right” and that the violent death of God’s son had paid for the sins of humanity. It is instead the unveiling of the true Power in the universe and the demonstration that the powers that were finally disarmed at the cross need no longer pose a threat to those who will not walk in their way, but will instead “march” under the banner and in the footsteps of the victorious lamb.

On the cross, Christ disarmed the powers, revealed their true nature and uncovered their weakness. In the resurrection, he sealed his victory by freeing Death’s captives and asserting his own supremacy. In the incarnation, Jesus united God and humanity in his own person. In his life and teachings he opposed and exposed the powers; he thus bound Satan (Matthew 12:22-29). In his death and resurrection he revealed this by showing evil’s impotence and taking the strong man’s spoils; he revealed that his death was not a sign that he had passively suffered at the hands of a greater power, but that he had conquered the powers – by turning the other cheek – and so liberated the captives. Thus, Jesus Christ (not some fragment of his work, but Christ himself) is the atonement.

Conclusion

Jesus died as he lived – peacefully liberating captives from the power of Sin. He clearly, explicitly and repeatedly taught his followers to fight oppression through peaceful means. This was not because he was afraid, or unable, to fight with violence, but because violence itself is a manifestation of the powers that we needed deliverance from. To repay violence with violence simply serves to strengthen its power over us and results in a world of blindness.

Instead, Jesus provided strategies for opposing Sin in such a way as to expose it to public disgrace. Time and again, these strategies have been proven to be successful by some of the most famous and revered men and women in modern history. The followers of Christ today must embrace the path that Jesus laid down for us. By acknowledging that his way is superior to our own and trusting in him, we can live under the reign of God and witness to the powers that His power is greater than that of Sin and Death. Through his radical and lasting commitment to non— violence, Jesus demonstrated that such liberating life can be costly. Yet, like Gandhi, Martin Luther-King and Desmond Tutu after him, he also showed that such a life will, ultimately, lead to victory.

The model of atonement proposed here is unmistakably and unashamedly grounded in the non-violent life and teachings of Jesus. It is thoroughly ethical in its basis and its application. I believe that it more than adequately avoids many of the problems with substitutionary atonement. I have not been able to fully unpack every facet of this model, but I trust that what has been discussed is sufficient to be built upon and taken further. This is a biblical model that is desperately needed in a world that continues to suffer from fighting terror with terror. In short, by revealing that Jesus Christ – in his life, death and resurrection – has provided rescue from the powers that threaten to hold us captive and has shown us how to live under the liberating rule of God, it is most assuredly good news.